Status/Recent Hiatus of my FSX Video Recording/Production

[StormILM]

Quick note here regarding my status/recent hiatus of my FSX video recording/production. As some may recall, around one year ago I finally & very belatedly got into something I had long wanted to do with my flight sim experience, learn to record videos & editing of those flights (to share & enhance the experience). As a novice at the time, I wanted to keep things as simple as possible & not go too overboard with high end recording/editing software. Overall I've learned a good bit and since last year and planned to slowly ease into some nice upgrades to render some high end FS videos. Last month some may remember my system rebuild to dual SSD/single HDD. Months prior to that partial PC rebuild, FSX was getting a but buggy with a very noticeable intermittent freezes/stutters and my efforts to fix that issue was 50/50 successful at best. Recording was more difficult because of the necessity to record & edit around stutters/micro freeze-ups. Generally a full FSX re-install is the best way to fix all of that buggy behavior. Now that everything is 100% back in place(hardware & software) and FSX is now running smoother than ever before, I ran into a major issue with my recording software which has ground my recording plans to a halt. Out of our general rule of decorum here to not bash software developers, lets just say that my attempt to get support from that software developer was totally unsatisfactory! They responded to my highly detailed error report with this response: “Unfortunately, we don't have a better solution”. SMH! Anyone who wishes to know who this company is & avoid them can PM me to get the name. Looking at their support forum, a lot of folks are having major trouble with their software which I believe is a combination of poor QC/Testing as well as them not addressing compatibility updates with Windows & other software vital to their software working together properly. I threw in the towel on that program getting sorted out and fell back to Fraps. After testing several different recording software types, Fraps did the best in terms of stability, rendering, and smoothness. The only negative I have with Fraps is the raw file size but that is easily & quickly sorted by freely available means. Thank goodness I have plenty of storage space now(6TB & counting) to help manage the ram Fraps files! I am also going to finally invest in EZdoc to help render a better selection of custom camera angles for recording as well as other effects. Last but not least, I have been mostly satisfied with MS Movie Maker's current form but am reviewing several options. I see some folks using Sony Vegas Pro 13 and earlier versions) for their editing but Pro 13 ranges between $400 to $800 and that's a NO GO! I am looking at Sony Movie Studio 13 Platinum which is a very reasonable price but am still researching other options (any suggestions here are welcome).

So anyhow, I hope to have my video making back up and running fairly soon and in a high quality format/end product so to speak.....